About

Assemble your physics gun from a wide range of parts, and take on the robot apocalypse in this vast, lush open world. Back us, and we will put a robot with your name on it into the game!

In BadLands RoadTrip, household robots have started hunting down their masters. Your weapons consist of guns with fully adjustable properties. Use them to fight the many enemy androids that are wreaking havoc everywhere. Put a stop to the murder-happy singularity and, since an adventure is always better with company, invite your friends to play with you over LAN!

The main goal of the game is to make a thing that actually shoots stuff. Assemble your physics gun from a large variety of parts, and adjust its handle, barrel, firing mechanics part, and bullet-type. Give your ammunition fuel to make rockets, add explosives to make bombs, or just make them heavier to cause even more damage on impact. As you progress, you'll become stronger and unlock more parts, so you can make even bigger and more sophisticated guns.

The guns are completely physics-enabled. This means: no ray-casting shots or linear movements, but actual physics meddling with the trajectory of whatever you've loaded your gun with. The length of the barrel, along with the weight of the bullet, affects your accuracy and travel distance. The firing mechanics have an impact on the firing rate and reload time. Different handles will put the barrels at different heights and will each also hold a different amount of barrels. Adjust your weapons to your own playstyle to maximize your efficiency, or just to have fun throwing things around.

The damage done and received is calculated with ‘round RPG points,’ a simple formula that’s based on the mass and relative speed of your projectile. As for how physics, arcs, and relative speed works: your bullets will do more damage when you run towards an enemy and when you are closer to them. Therefore, daring and courageous players will deal more damage.

That is only an example of what you can do with the physics-based combat, however. Gravity and inertia can help you to wreak havoc in as many ways as your imagination allows. Try it out yourself in the concept demo, and share whatever zany contraptions you can come up with!

Travel the lush, open world of BadLands RoadTrip to discover the identity of the person who was stupid enough to trigger that singularity last week. Receive quests from the citizens of different towns and fight enemies on the way to your next clue.

The world of BadLands will also contain a lot of environmental storytelling, for those who like to indulge in the finer details. Every NPC and every sign in the game's world has a purpose in telling you how the robot uprising came to be and which characters were involved in it. If you’re not interested in the world’s backstory, though, you can skip it all the same, and the game will be all action.

The game will feature a character creator, so you can personalize your character to your heart’s content. The story will also feature a lot of NPCs to flesh out the plot, and we’ll talk about a couple of them below. Warning: they contain minor spoilers for both the full game and the concept demo.

It’s dangerous to go alone, so bring a friend with you over LAN! We won't put a cap on how many people you can take on an adventure but do remember that the enemies will get stronger for each player in the match.

You will be able to go on quests and demolish enemies with your friends. It will also be possible to go your separate ways on branching paths in certain quests, which may open up opportunities for co-op speed running.

We are a small game development company, and we want to make our biggest game yet. For this, we need money and exposure, and Kickstarter has proven to give just that. If we successfully complete this Kickstarter campaign, the project will be viable in its simplest form, but we also have many more ideas that we want to put into the game via stretch goals. Most notably, we'd like to add a VR version and customizable vehicles.

We also want to do something special with this campaign. Kickstarter has a big, loving community, and we want to make a special sequence to show our appreciation. We want to make an interactive credits scene that happens just before the final boss fight. You can buy a robot with your own name on it in the fight. The player will have to defeat your robot, and those of the other backers, in order to survive and get to that final boss. You'll get to go out in a bang, with your name shining within beautiful particles when the robot gets blown up. For more details, please read the “Buy a bot in the credits fight” part down below.

Every tier has its own rewards as detailed in the table below.

The Game

The game will be provided through Steam for the Windows platform. If we manage to hit our first and second stretch goals, we will add Linux and Mac versions, too. We plan to start early access in late Q4 of 2017.

Buy a bot in the credits fight! *

We want to do something incredibly awesome with our credits entries, just to say thank you to our supporters. Instead of just going with the regular scrolling text ending, we will show an epic battle with waves of robots that are named after every backer. Your name will be displayed on one of the panels of the robots, and when you beat it, it explodes while displaying the backer’s name on the screen. But that’s not all: at higher tiers, your entry will get increasingly fancier:

At the ‘facial demolition’ tier, you can send in a picture or drawing of your face to be slapped onto the robot’s head.

At the ‘silent alarm’ tier, your robot will be upgraded to an even more menacing model.

At the ‘voice identification’ tier, you can voice two lines that'll be played when your robot enters the arena and when it gets destroyed.

Note: If you can’t provide a picture and/or spoken lines, we will make sure to make something for you. If we deem a submission inappropriate and we can’t come to an agreement after discussion, we will try to make something as close to your original submission as possible (but within our guidelines), or replace it with our own idea.

The soundtrack

At the ‘fully featured’ tier, you will get the full soundtrack by Storytime Symphony, which includes somewhere between 40 and 50 minutes of awesome BadLands RoadTrip ambiance songs. Estimated release date: early Q4 2017.

Design a weapon *

This game is about creating your own guns, so we want YOU to tell us what you want to use as a weapon. Design a handle, barrel, firing mechanics part, and bullet set, and we’ll put it in the game.

Design an outfit *

The final game will have a character editor, but what if you were also the fashion designer? Design your own gloves, shoes, jacket, and hairstyle or hat, and we’ll put it in the game.

Write a quest *

The ultimate addition to the game: write a story quest for the player to unravel. What do you think happened during the singularity? Tell us, and we’ll put it in the game. We’ll let you in on a bit of the world's layout so you can fit your story into it accordingly.

We want to get our project 100% funded, but there's a lot more to get to after that. These are our stretch goals:

€5000 – Three laws broken

The project is funded; the game will release on Steam for the Windows platform.

Awesome credits fight; we will make a final battle with many waves of enemies with all of our backers' names, faces, and voices attached to them.

€7500 – RoadTrip of the penguins

Linux version; at this tier, we can add another platform to our release schedule.

Day/night cycle; making sure everything looks fine from every angle under waning sunlight brings extra work, but the sunset looks so cool! Hence, this is part of the first stretch goal.

€10000 – To keep the doctor away

Mac version; another platform will be added, so all sorts of computers can play the game together.

Jetpacks; we’ll expand the world by making areas where you can make huge jumps with jetpacks. Why? Because jetpacks are awesome!

€15000 – It’s no holodeck, but…

HTC Vive version; We will add Vive functionality, and the full game will be playable in VR. We’ve already done some preliminary testing for it.

Extra accessories; the character creator will have more clothing options available.

€20000 – It found a voice

Story voice acting; we’ll get our voice actor friends to bring the character quests to life.

Lyrics in the final credits song; because we like to sing along.

€30000 – Download a car

Vehicles and a bigger world; this is our ultimate stretch goal. If we get here, we will put an extra customization system in for vehicles. Of course, these vehicles need places to explore, so we’ll expand the game with more open landscapes where you can race all you want. This world will be 4 times larger than the originally planned size and 16 times as large as the current demo world.

Our team consists of friends, family, and freelancers. This is us:

Oswald de Bruin – Creator

The programmer and director of the game is Oswald de Bruin. BadLands Roadtrip is the fourth game he is going to release with his company, Obsessive Science Games. With a degree in computer science, as well as several media minors, both his code and story are bound to be solid.

Enalya – Lindy Damen – Art director

Having worked with Oswald on “Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze,” Lindy is the perfect artist to set the visual direction of BadLands RoadTrip. She already has many projects under her belt and has proven to be a great help in bringing the game leaps forward.

Bram van Dijk – Composer

Also a great contributor to Obsessive Science Games’s "Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze," Bram returns as Storytime Symphony to deliver another great, memorable soundtrack. Planning a 50 minute soundtrack, he’s sure to bring the world of BadLands to life.

Matthijs de Rijk – 3D modeller

Matthijs joins the team to help tackle artistic hurdles and supply environmental expertise. As gun parts are quite experimental and environments are a big part of the game, we’re happy to have him onboard.

Xander Dezentje – Character modeller

Xander has been modelling characters ever since he got his hands on a modeling program back in the 90s. We’ve worked with him before, and we’re glad to have him back.

And many more

There are a lot of small and not-so-small things to do when making a game, like testing, checking for writing errors, and creating small details for the UI. The Kickstarter funds will help us hire the experts we need to ensure that even the smallest of details are onpoint.

This Kickstarter campaign will help us expand the game to something closer to our initial idea. The funds will be divided roughly as follows:

A lot of the work, especially the code development, has already been funded out of our own pockets, but with your help, we can make this project even greater.

Thank you for helping us get BadLands RoadTrip on the road!

* Note on submissions

Please keep your designs, submitted photo’s and submitted name as family friendly as possible (or, in the case of weaponry, as family friendly as it can get). The design should not clash too much with the fun and cartoony ambiance of the game. Stay away from adult themes, and keep all violence to bloodless bluntforce. The development team has the final say in all additions and reserves the right to make alterations to and/or censor the design. However, we will try to keep everything as close to the original design as possible. Copyright of the assets and their likenesses goes to Obsessive Science Games.

Risks and challenges

This is the biggest game we’ve ever made, so the scope of the project might be cause for unexpected challenges and/or delays. We know what it takes to complete and release a game, but a bigger scope brings the possibility for more challenges and unforeseen delays.

There is also the potential that extra features from the stretch goals, especially vehicle customization, may cause some delays. In that case, we will aim to release the original game as originally planned and then add in the extra features during early access.

We are confident that we can and will finish BadLands RoadTrip. The most important systems, such as the guns, quest system, environment, jetpack prototyping, and even VR prototyping, are already in working condition, so delivery of the finished game is just a matter of adding more content. We have finished and released multiple commercial games in the past, and we will make sure that this one sees the light of day, too.